...fitting for college, to which I went very unwillingly.
Just before I was to enter, my mother asked the Hon. Caleb Cushing, then a member of Congress from Massachusetts, to give me an appointment at West Point , a thing of which I was very desirous.
He had known my mother, and knew that she was a soldier's widow, and he expressed a willingness to appoint me at the next vacancy.
But that vacancy would be...